Violence and the Movies

Colonel Dave Grossman has a book called ON KILLING that I strongly recommend. It’s about every aspect of killing in war situations, and one of the things he talks about is how the military uses films and video simulators to break down a recruit’s natural resistance to killing people. This resistance is natural; it’s inborn, and it has to be eroded or eradicated in order for soldiers to kill.

In World War II, for example, only 15 to 20 percent of the soldiers even fired their weapons, according to Grossman’s statistics. By Vietnam, however, thanks to these training techniques, that figure was up over 90 percent. The problem, however, with turning men into killers is that it’s very hard for them to adjust their minds back to normal life. That’s why there was so much Post Traumatic Stress associated with Vietnam and now Iraq veterans are also having a hard time.

What does this have to do with movies and what do either have to do with Virginia Tech?

Just this: Grossman makes the case that our entire popular culture, our movies and television, the bulk of our narrative entertainment, is exactly like the military’s mind-altering indoctrination. In other words, if we, as a culture, decided that we wanted to turn everybody into a violent maniac, and overcome people’s resistance to killing, we would do exactly what we’re doing now. Make violence fun. Inure people to gore. Basically, Grossman says, our entertainment is like the opposite of what the protagonist of “A Clockwork Orange” went through: It’s virtually designed to make viewers violent.

None of these factors work alone. There is the availability of guns. There are social factors. And of course not everyone will be affected. And some will be affected more than others. This is not cause and effect. There are causes, and there are effects. But to deny the role that violent films and video games play is, in my opinion, to indulge in fantasy. Pop culture plays its role in making life seem cheap and violence empowering, interesting and satisfying.

Finally, I wrote this in 2000, looking back on Columbine. The chances of anything like I’m describing here are exactly nil. The money behind this is too powerful for individuals to combat:

When the tragedy in Littleton, Colo., happened last year, the most eerie thing about it was not that the violence was senseless but that it seemed to make perfect sense. It wasn’t that we couldn’t believe it but that we could, and easily. The killings seemed like a logical extension of our culture, the expression of a national unconscious.

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Lately, watching movies . . . I wonder if we’re not seeing the creation of a new kind of humanity. A head gets cut off, and the audience laughs. That’s just one film, but it’s indicative of the modern aesthetic. Once audiences experienced pity and terror when Oedipus put out his own eyes. Today there is no possibility for tragedy because there is no faith in the bigness of life, in the importance of the individual soul.

Because images invade us under the threshold of consciousness, it’s important who gets to manipulate those images. The Catholic Church was the fierce enemy of early Hollywood if only because, until film, the Vatican was the world’s champion at image manipulation. Statues, paintings, architecture and spectacle all combined to convey the church’s power, authority and majesty.

Today the church doesn’t have the same hold, [but] Hollywood [is] an even more cynical manipulator. Fifty years ago, character was defined as a triumph of restraint — in terms of discipline and tough choices. But the libidinous quality of popular culture now redefines character in terms of raw impulses expressed.

At a time when parents are often conspicuously absent, children are being left to be raised by the basest impulses of a capitalism pandering to the most perverted appetites. Hollywood encourages and stimulates the human impulse for violence and thrills, while video games indoctrinate children in the pleasures of shooting people and blowing them up.

The dilemma for parents today is how to keep their kids out of the path of a depraved culture and yet not render them unsuited for functioning in that culture. How much exposure serves as an inoculation? How much creates the sickness? These are not questions worthy of a sane society. A culture should be able to draw the line.

Clearly, the answer isn’t censorship. Yet the rating system might be. Hollywood needs to change its ratings criteria so that violence is taken seriously. The film industry will never volunteer to do this, but under pressure from consumers and the government it will have no choice.

Set up the ratings so that if a gun goes off, it’s NC-17. If someone is murdered onscreen, it’s NC-17. Try it. How could it hurt? Fewer violent movies will be made. So what? Who cares? Artists such as Abel Ferrara will still make masterpieces like “Bad Lieutenant,” and they will still be rated NC-17. “Naked Killer,” one of my favorite violent films, was an adults-only picture when it premiered in Hong Kong. That’s how it should be.